Information warfare extends beyond the physical world and strikes at
one of the most valuable resources today. It could be a teenage hacker shutting
down the nation's phone system or a foreign government dropping magnetic bombs,
but the purpose is the same: destabilize a country by destroying its
information infrastructure.

While the myriad of possible attacks are easy to imagine, how law enforcement
and the military should respond remains controversial. One of the loudest and
most provocative voices to emerge in the debate is that of Winn Schwartau, a
44-year-old rock producer turned computer security expert. His book,
Information Warfare: Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway, was the first
nonclassified work to take a close look at the subject - and it has helped
define the field.

Schwartau's struggle to open people's eyes to the importance of information
warfare is not without critics. Many claim IW is just another buzzword or
hyped-up threat meant to justify new military expenditures in the post-Cold War
period.

Adamant that the threat is real, Schwartau is working on three new books and a
movie about IW.

Wired
: How do you respond to people who
don't believe information warfare is a real threat?

Schwartau: I hope they don't become
victims. It's not just a bunch of hype. Let's go back and look at what was
happening 20 years ago. Were there hackers? Well, maybe a few university guys
who played games with each other. Now look at the curve: a couple hackers in
the 1980s, and then came the Net and connectivity. One thing led to another,
and suddenly hackers are a real problem. The same thing occurred with computer
viruses, and the same thing will occur with information warfare.

I remember back in 1990, 1991 when I first started talking about magnetic
weapon systems, which I firmly believe are the nuclear weapons of the
information age. People laughed me off the stage. They said, "That stuff isn't
for real. It's crazy." But I've seen these weapons work. The military's got a
huge assortment of them, and the capability is going to be distributed
throughout the world at various levels. Most people are not going to have the
gigawatt, terawatt systems, but you can do an awful lot of damage with a
home-brew 100-megawatt weapon.

What about the claim that since IW is invisible it will never have the
impact of a bomb?

IW does not have the immediate emotional impact of lots of dead bodies lying on
the streets of London, New York, or Oklahoma City. That's true. However, say I
wage an IW attack against a series of US domestic air carriers where I don't
use a conventional bomb but an electromagnetic bomb, which sufficiently
interferes with the avionics of the plane to cause it to crash. Just ask pilots
what they have seen and experienced when passengers use electronic equipment
they shouldn't. That is terror. Or, what if people can't get their money from
ATMs because the network has been destroyed? You'll see a lot of very unhappy
people. In this case, the negative effects reach all the way down to a highly
distributed population, not just a very targeted localized one as with a bomb.

How should the US defend itself against these types of electronic
attacks?

The biggest problem I see from the US standpoint is, What do you do if a
well-motivated and well-financed bad guy decides to come after the US?
Traditionally, the FBI is supposed to take care of these kinds of threats. My
concern is that with severe information warfare, the FBI and domestic services
do not have the capability or the responsive strategies and tactics needed to
react.

So the military should be in charge?

The problem is Posse Comitatus, which is an act passed in 1878. It basically
says the military cannot operate within the US. What we need to do is come to a
new type of understanding, a new type of agreement where we have a centralized
offensive and defensive capability. We need to have ways to deploy that
domestically without upsetting the population. We don't have that model yet.